I moved to D.C. in 1978, for college, and I am still amazed at how folks here overreact to snow. For those of you lucky enough to live elsewhere, they cancelled school for today before the snow even started and the federal government closed at lunchtime even though as I look at my window now there’s barely anything sticking to the street yet.

My grandmother spent a year in Jerusalem on a pilgrimage and said they got a dusting of snow once and everyone panicked, because it didn’t happen very often. But in Washington there’s snow every year — usually a little, sometimes a lot — so everyone already owns a shovel. I can see why urban singles in apartments would rush to the store, because they might not have anything in the fridge but a bottle of mustard. But even out here in the suburbs, where people have pantries and freezers, there’s still the stupid rush to the grocery store that Jonah described.

All I can say is, it’s good the Russians didn’t come pouring through the Fulda Gap when it was snowing in Washington, because the whole national-security infrastructure would have been paralyzed by the fear of frozen water.